SAS Operation Galia

By Robert Graham Hann

Two Days after Christmas 1944, during the harshest winter in living memory, 33 SAS troops parachuted into the valley of Rossano, Northern Italy. Carried out in broad daylight, the parachute drop was intended to deceive enemy forces into believing that a full parachute brigade had landed behind them. Drawing on post-op reports and memoirs, this b

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upfront
• Release date: Feb 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780359724

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Preface

The Italian Campaign 1943–45

The turning of the tide against the Nazis came with a series of Allied victories in 1942–3 and, specifically, with the Battle of Midway in June 1942 when the destruction of four Japanese aircraft carriers abruptly ended Japanese naval superiority in the Pacific. The British-led victory in El Alamein in October and the Allied landings in French North Africa in November, followed by the Axis forces surrender in the desert war, all had an effect. The military catastrophe which eventually engulfed the German Army at Stalingrad in January 1943 effectively ended Nazi expansionist aspirations in the Soviet Union.

By the summer of 1943 the Nazi war machine was looking increasingly vulnerable and was suffering attacks on many fronts as well as a drop in morale after years of constant fighting on foreign soil. German forces suffered another devastating defeat at the hands of the Russians in the great tank battle of Kursk. German cities were also being attacked from the air on a regular basis by British and American bombers; Japan was suffering unsustainable losses of aircraft and merchant shipping.

The fortunes of the various resistance groups which had been established began to improve, with the help of clandestine Allied support through such organisations as the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was initiated by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on July 22, 1940, to conduct warfare by means other than direct military engagement. Its mission was to encourage and facilitate espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines and to serve as the core of the Auxiliary Units, a British resistance movement.

It was also known as ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’ and was charged by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’.

In the aftermath of the Italian capitulation in 1943, the SOE helped build a large resistance organisation in the cities of northern Italy, and in the Alps. Italian partisans harassed German forces in Italy throughout the autumn and winter of 1944–5.

The SOE established a base at Bari in Southern Italy, from which they operated their networks and agents thoughout Europe and the Balkans.

Some partisan groups in France, Northern Italy (as we shall see) and Yugoslavia by the latter stages of the war had blossomed to become strong military forces. The communist factions in parti cular became very active in many places. This also complicated the situation in some areas, particularly Italy, since the objective of the communists was often to encourage revolution after overcoming the immediate threat posed by the fascist forces currently ranged against them. This sometimes prevented co-ordinated opposition to the common enemy.

Mussolini

Italy had a short history as a single nation, and its politics had always been diverse. Benito Mussolini founded his Fascist Party in 1919 as a militant, anti-socialist movement. He ruled Italy from 1922 and by 1925 he had fully established his position as dictator. His career was followed with great interest by Adolf Hitler as he similarly rose from obscurity to absolute power and dictatorship in the 1930s. By then Mussolini and his fascist state had, seem ingly, brought long overdue modernisation to Italy and had instilled in the wider population a sense of national pride which (like Germany) had been dented by its performance in the First World War. The effectiveness and impact of Italian fascism was limited and curtailed to an extent by the power of the Roman Catholic Church. Gradually, Mussolini became more and more influenced by his charismatic German counterpart. In 1937, Hitler persuaded Mussolini to sign the anti-commiturn pact which further strengthened the bond between the two fascist heads of state by expressing their common antipathy for communism.

For many ordinary hard-working Italians and their families, in particular the contadini (peasants), the fascist state was simply a fact of life, to be tolerated, much like the weather, sometimes good, sometimes bad. To most mountain folk, central government in any form was generally despised and its taxes disliked. Many youngsters joined the Fascist movement simply as a convenient youth club, without giving any particular thought to the aims or real meaning of Fascism. Each town and village would have its identifiable fascists, but they would generally be relatively few, busying themselves with politics and self-aggrandisement, whilst the rest of the population got on with the daily grind of making a living. It was only when Mussolini decided to go to war that the situation began to change.

Mussolini, like Hitler, undoubtedly had grandiose plans to establish Italy as a major world power, but unlike Hitler he didn’t plan to achieve his ends by provoking a major war involving his European neighbours. Instead he preferred smaller adventures, where the stakes were not so high, where the world’s attention was perhaps not as focused and where his better-equipped forces stood a good chance of overwhelming a weaker, less well-equipped opposition. The invasion of Abyssinia in 1935–6 typifies his approach.

Mussolini, whilst signing a formal alliance (the so called ‘Pact of Steel’) with Hitler in 1939, was also cautious about declaring his wholehearted support for Germany’s war aims. When Britain and France declared war with Germany in September 1939 Mussolini preferred to wait and see how events transpired before showing his true allegiances, declaring Italy a ‘non-belligerent’ state. Only when France and most of Europe had fallen to Hitler and the Nazis in June 1940 and Britain looked certain to follow, did Mussolini finally determine that the time was ripe to declare himself and his country on the side of what he must have thought at that time would be the obvious ultimate victor. Mussolini was concerned that Italy would risk missing out on the spoils of war following Hitler’s surprisingly rapid advance through north-west Europe

Italy thus entered into the conflict, allied to Germany, on the 10th June 1940 and as a ‘reward’ Hitler permitted Italy to occupy two small pieces of territory in Southern France, following that country’s capitulation. However, this was not sufficient to satisfy Mussolini’s ambition and he ordered his forces to invade Greece in October.

This proved a disastrous adventure for the Italians and their forces were soon swept back by the Allies into Albania by the end of the year. Italian forces proved similarly ill-prepared for battle and suffered heavy losses whilst fighting the British in North and East Africa. Importantly, many ordinary Italian servicemen felt a natural affinity towards the British and Americans, and had relatives living and working in the United Kingdom or the US, and had no wish to fight against them. The orders of their fascist leaders failed to create any esprit de corps or great enthusiasm for the conflict.

Germany was soon forced to come to the assistance of the Italians in both theatres of war (Greece and Africa) instigated by Mussolini, but not before a large part of his Mediterranean fleet had been destroyed by the Allies. Only the Italian midget submarines proved to be a real success.

By the summer of 1943, following a string of military defeats in Africa, Albania, Greece, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, the Allied invasion of Sicily and Allied bombing raids on the Italian mainland, industrial strikes in Milan and Turin had plunged Italy into political chaos. Hitler was so concerned upon hearing reports that the Italian Army was in a state of collapse that he made a lightening visit to Northern Italy to bolster his friend’s morale. He promised to provide Mussolini with reinforcements, U-boats and new terror weapons in return for Italy’s continued support. But Mussolini’s downfall was near. Arriving back from his meeting with Hitler he found Rome had been bombed by the Allies and rebellion was in the air.

On the 25th July 1943, Mussolini was placed under arrest and formally stripped of office by King Victor Emmanuel III, having being voted out by his former supporters on the ruling ‘Fascist Grand Council’. It was ‘Finito Benito’, as the British Officer’s at Chieti POW camp’s Information Agency were to put it.

The king took control of the armed forces and appointed an anti-fascist, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, as Prime Minister. From then on, Italy searched for an exit strategy from the war but that proved very difficult to achieve.

At this stage of the war three British Officers who would later play a crucial role in the SAS Operation Galia, were all POWs in Italy. Captain Bob Walker Brown (later to become the Commander of the SAS Galia Squadron) and Major Gordon Lett (the SOE officer on the ground at Rossano who called in the SAS raid) knew each other well, having both been incarcerated in the notorious Chieti POW camp in Southern Italy. Lieutenant James Riccomini was a native Italian speaker and the SAS’s interpreter on Galia. All three officers (separately) escaped their captors in 1943–4, following the Italian armistice. After many adventures, Walker Brown and Riccomini made it back to England and subsequently joined the SAS, whereas Major Lett found shelter in the Northern Apennines and became an SOE operative working behind the enemy lines. All three (as described in this book) were destined to meet again some eighteen months later at Rossano on Operation Galia.

The Allies had landed in Sicily at Syracuse on the 10th July 1943 and liberated the island as a prelude to the full-scale invasion of the Italian mainland which took place two months later. However, despite Mussolini’s overthrow, the Italian’s were still technically at war with the Allies. At the same time, Italy itself was playing ‘host’ to significant numbers of German forces.

This must have been a time of great danger and confusion for many Italians. Their erstwhile German allies, who had come to their assistance when they had got themselves into trouble in Greece and Africa, now regarded them with distain and disgust as it looked increasingly likely that Italy would attempt to extricate itself from the war. In early August 1943 the Italian Government assured the Germans there would be no separate peace negotiations with the Allies but, following a devastating Allied bombing raid on Milan on the 12th August, secret negotia tions for an armistice began. General Giuseppe Castellano was despatched to the newly liberated island of Sicily to seek whatever assurances he could from the Allies that they would assist the Italian people to resist reprisals from the German occupying forces within Italy, in return for Italy’s cessation from hostilities. On the 3rd September General Castellano signed an agreement to cease hostilities with the Allies, and to delay an announcement of the armistice, so as not to prejudice the imminent Allied invasion plans which were about to be put into action at Salerno.

Although General Castellano had hoped to sign his country out of the war, unfortunately this depended upon the Germans doing the ‘decent thing’ by withdrawing from Italy. Of course they did not do so. The Germans generally showed no inclination to yield territory without heavy fighting and in Italy they acted true to form, by promptly moving to occupy Rome and to re-enforce other vital strategic positions. The Royalist Government in the South then declared war on Germany.

As events were to prove over the next two years, the liberation of Italy became one of the hardest and bitterly fought campaigns of the war, very costly in terms of casualties, both civilian and military, and lasting right up to the death-throes of the Third Reich. To complicate matters further, once it became clear that eventually the Allies would win the war, the political competition between the various partisan bands operating in enemy-occupied Italy became intense. Political activists looked beyond the increasingly inevitable fall of Mussolini to the political vacuum that would exist thereafter. After so many years of dictatorship, this was perhaps both understandable and inevitable, but it proved on occasion an appreciable handicap to British and American missions and operations behind enemy lines.

The formation of the SAS

The origins of the Special Air Service began in 1941 when a young Lieutenant in the Scots Guards called David Stirling had a bright idea while recuperating in hospital from injuries sustained on his first parachute jump. The plan he came up with involved the establish ment of small highly mobile and highly trained units of men who would operate far behind enemy lines in order to exploit the element of surprise to the full. The object would be to disrupt enemy communications and supply lines and generally to cause as much mayhem as possible for the enemy before slipping away.

Stirling argued that a small force focused on a strate gically important target such as an aerodrome, roads, fuel depot or vehicles would cause the enemy real problems but with minimal demands on manpower, equipment and resources. Moreover, the destruction of fifty aircraft or units of transport was, he reckoned, more easily accom plished by a sub-unit of five men than by a force of 200.

He proposed each unit must be self-sufficient and responsible for its own training and operational planning and that forty such units be recruited in the first instance and trained to arrive on the scene by land, sea or air as the occasion demanded. Stirling, as a relatively junior ranked officer, had to show great initiative to get his proposals before the relevant army ‘Top Brass’ and turn his bright idea into reality – but initiative was a resource Stirling had in spades.

Two days after getting his proposals in a most un orthodox way, before General Claude Auchinleck, the then new Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, Stirling was promoted to captain and given a brief to recruit six officers and sixty men for a force to be known as L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade. Based at Kabrit near the Suez Canal, Stirling began his recruitment drive drawing on volunteers from the commando forces, the men who subsequently became known as the ‘Originals’. After three months of training, during which two men were killed when their parachutes failed to open, and after his men had carried out successful ‘dummy raids’ against an RAF airfield, L Detachment SAS was ready for action.

By then they had been given their unique identity – the winged dagger cap badge and their motto ‘Who Dares Wins’ – and had been briefed on their first operation. Planned for November 1941, to coincide with a British offensive codenamed Operation Crusader, Stirling and his men were supposed to hit five airfields on the North African coast and blow up as many enemy aircraft on the ground as they could before the British offensive began. The day of the parachute drop the weather intervened. Despite strong winds the five planes took off carrying the SAS force.

As they neared the drop zone two planes were shot down by anti-aircraft fire and of the three units that successfully managed to jump into the gale, most were blown off course. A number of these men were injured on landing and to compound the problems, the bombs they had brought were recovered but not the detonators. Without them the mission had to be abandoned and in bedraggled groups the survivors made their way to the rendezvous where they were to be met and picked up by the Long Range Desert Group (a British recon naissance and intelligence gathering unit) in their Chevrolet trucks. Only 22 of the original 65 men were in the event collected by the LRDG.

However, from this inauspicious start, Stirling drew one positive conclusion which was to serve the SAS well in the remainder of their North African Desert campaign: if the LRDG could get his men out, they could also get them within walking distance of their targets and there was no need to risk the uncertainties and inherent dangers of parachute drops in order to commence operations.

In December 1941 the remaining ‘Originals’ launched frequent surprise attacks against enemy airfields behind the lines at numerous sites and successfully destroyed over 100 enemy aircraft plus stores, petrol and vehicles. Their tactics proved a great success in the desert and the SAS was responsible for destroying more enemy aircraft on the ground than the RAF destroyed in the air.

With success came the need for more recruits and L Detachment was increased to two troops of 60 men. Throughout the summer of 1942 these units attacked airfields and harried road traffic in small raiding parties across the North African Front.

In September the SAS was raised to full regimental status – 1 SAS Regiment – with an HQ squadron and four combat squadrons – A, B, the Free French and the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), the latter two know as C and D respectively. By December Lieutenant Colonel Stirling (as he now was) had over 650 men under his command and the new year began well for the British: Rommel was in full retreat after El Alamein and the SAS was launching ever more hit and run attacks on the enemy troops as they retreated.

But then Stirling was captured after accompanying his men on a sabotage mission behind enemy lines in North Africa towards the end of January 1943.

Stirling’s capture led to the break up of the original SAS with the Free French and Greeks who had joined going back to their respective armies and the maritime section, the SBS, hived off to Palestine. The 250 strong 1 SAS was renamed the Special Raiding Squadron (‘SRS’). However, the Stirling family were a resourceful bunch and David’s brother Bill had, in the meantime, created another SAS regiment – 2 SAS – which had fought with great distinction in the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy in 1943. Success required the ranks of the SAS to be con stantly refreshed and renewed and 2 SAS carried out a further recruitment campaign in the autumn of 1943 to establish 3 Squadron.

The Allied invasion of Italy

General Eisenhower (the Supreme Allied Commander) announced the Italian surrender on the 8th September 1943, timed to coincide with the major Allied landings on the west coast of Italy at Salerno and to avoid resistance by Italian troops stationed on the coast. The German response to the news was swift and they took action to repel the Allied forces and prevent them from establishing a beachhead.

The Germans had realised well in advance of the armistice what was likely to happen. Italy had lost Sicily to the Allies, Mussolini had been deposed and confined to a mountain prison, and inevit ably the new government would look to sue for peace. Germany could not afford to give up Italy without a fight, since Italy could never now be a nonmilitary zone, and an Allied presence there would expose Germany to attack from a mainland foothold to its south. Germany had to fight for Italy in order to maintain its own security. Therefore, in the weeks before the armistice it increased its military presence in Italy, and prepared for the worst.

Within weeks of Mussolini’s arrest he was rescued from his mountain top prison, a hotel on top of the Gran Sasso D’Italia, the highest range in the Abruzzi Apennines. The hotel could only be reached over land by funicular railway. The Germans learned of Mussolini’s whereabouts, made aerial reconnaissance and decided that glider troops might make a landing, overcome the Carabinieri and could escape with the Duce in a small plane. Incredibly, this daring plan was carried out on September 13th under the leadership of an SS officer called Otto Skorzeny.

As soon as he was rescued, Hitler appointed his old friend Mussolini as a puppet ruler in the northern part of Italy that Germany still occupied… no longer ‘Finito Benito’.

Mussolini’s fascist supporters kept him in power for a further eighteen months in that part of Italy yet to be liberated by the Allies. Mussolini used the Brigata Nera, the Fascist Militia, in conjunction with the Waffen-SS and the Gestapo, to instil terror into those who showed dissent to his rule. For the first time Jews were deported from Italy into Germany where they faced Hitler’s Final Solution.

The German forces in Italy had the good fortune to be commanded by a military leader of great resilience and fortitude in the person of Field Marshal Kesselring. In consequence, Allied progress, even with the great advantage of overwhelming air supremacy, was painfully slow. Kesselring master-minded a strategy designed to slow down or prevent the Allied advance through Italy. He ordered the building of a series of formidable defensive lines, the first of which was established south of Rome. Known as the Gustav Line, it ran from coast to coast, and included the stronghold mountain fortress of Monte Cassino.

The country along the Gustav Line was rugged and difficult to traverse. The winter weather in 1944–5 was bitter, one of the worst in living memory. The German troops were tough, battle-hardened and experienced. It was a feature, also, of German/fascist tactics that they used the utmost brutality to suppress any signs of resistance. Kesselring was to (in part) answer for this at Nuremberg in the